Running on fumes
by TaillessGiraffe
Summary: She feels like one of her father's poorly finished jobs: brutally dismantled and briskly reassembled by his oily hands, thrown back out to sputter her way through this fucked up world until her overheated engine coughs its last breath.
1. Childhood

If someone ever asked for her life story and she had to, like, tell it from the beginning, she'd probably start on that night, the week after her 14th birthday, when her father decided that, what the hell, she was born flawed, might as well finish the job.

But people always considered the beginning to be the day one is born, and so, the times she ever pictured how her first interrogatory would be like, wondering if they would have tons of documents relating her whole life story, she would make an effort and try to remember something remotely close to a childhood, even if it was to not let that bastard define her freaking existence.

Kids in TV had tons of toys, artery exploding breakfasts and a mother who brushed their hair and scolded them so they would go to sleep early. Her toys were her father's tools, her brothers' _'weird tasty lemon balloons'_ and magazines full of naked people- such confused giggling material back then. There were no breakfasts unless you caught some leftover from a days old diner. And her mother- well, her mother tried, that's for sure, the times she wasn't too drunk or too doped from self-medicating to do shit.

But yeah, sure, one could call it a childhood, if you squinted your eyes pretty hard and tilted your head and repeated to yourself that not all childhoods are full of toys or meals or maternal comfort.

It was a small town, where she lived. A bunch of boring, small streets of family-owned business with a single building for middle and high school and a collapsing playground growing disheveled grass in the middle of it all.

Their house could have even been pretty, if it wasn't in a constant state of decay, or if someone would have bothered to actually clean after themselves. It was one of those two stories houses, far out of town, closest neighbors living about two miles away. Would have passed for a farm, but Instead of animals, they accumulated trash around their lawn- although it did attract different types of wild life.

There were no pictures of her as a newborn, so she couldn't really tell whether she had been born too fat, or too blue- but she did know her mother never went to an hospital and that she had totally destroyed her in the way out, so there was that.

Her room was upstairs, a small space meant more for storage rather than sleeping, but her mother had actually bothered to paint the walls white and pink and she had a clean mattress all for her own, so she never really complained. Her brothers had to sleep two, maybe three at a time in the same room, so to have her own space? That was a privilege.

She remembered in flashes being a little brat, still in the my-shit-is-my-art phase. At some point they decided that changing her diaper was too much work, so they simply let her walk around naked from the waist down, wearing some old and greasy t-shirt from one of her brothers as an improvised dress.

It had been easy, if a little painful, to learn to walk, as late as she had started. She could even think of those times with fondness, remembering her family laughing as she tried to stand and kept falling on her butt, all sitting around the faulty TV with their pre-cooked meals on their laps and their mouths full of munched garbage. Then her brother Louis would let her have a bit of his bitter tasting drink and the world would go all blurry and funny, and she would stumble around the living room until she tripped over her own feet and fell face first. She'd laugh too, bless her soul, thinking it was hilarious to make them all have fun like that.

But no one ever taught her how to use the toilet, and so she would make more than a mess a day when she couldn't hold back any longer. Those were the first times her mother ever hit her. She thought it was normal, after having done such a thing in the living room corner. She was pretty sure other mothers would also grab their kids by the hair and throw them away, to teach them a lesson.

So she would hold back the tears and run to the bathroom, trying to guess just how the hell she could do like her brothers. But she wasn't tall enough, and as hard as she tried she couldn't control her ray of sunshine as well as they did.

Eventually she learnt to run outside whenever her stomach said it was time to evacuate, until the day she caught a glimpse of her mother sitting on the toilet, one of those times she was too dizzy to remember to close the door, and she finally understood how that damn thing worked.

See, it's not pretty to start stories like this. No one wants to hear about how you learnt to take a shit.

It was probably more interesting to talk about things like her father's work. He'd spend the entire day in the garage, fixing and assembling those super cool motorcycles and playing that loud music he and her brothers loved so much.

It was so noisy and so stinky and he always used such cool and strange tools, and she was astonished as she watched him work. Sometimes he'd yell at her to stop touching this or put that fucking thing down, other times he'd directly push or kick her away, all depending the position he was working in. The times he was in a better mood he'd start telling her all about the process, how to replace parts, how the engines worked, and how it all changed depending on the model. This tool does this, this metallic thing goes here. Sometimes he'd even tell her that if she worked hard she could, maybe, pick up the business when he died. Even if she was a woman, and women knew nothing about this stuff, she was lucky cause she could learn having him as a teacher. And she'd bounce with excitement and beg him to please, yes, teach her.

Once he was done with the vehicle, these scary guys with the long beards, shaved heads and leather jackets would come to pick it up and give her daddy a lot of money. Money that never bought them food or paid for the cable, but money none the less. One of them, a big man with sunglasses, he tried to talk with her, asking in whispers where she got her boo-boo from, and he tried to punch her father that day. But daddy had a gun and the guy had to run away in his motorcycle. Her dad told her that the guy with the sunglasses wanted to hurt her and take her away from her family, and that he had saved her life. And she was so proud of her dad, protecting her like that.

Yeah, those times weren't all that bad.

School was surprisingly good with her when she started. Sure, she was a bit behind her classmates, had to learn to read and write between classes, since she had never been to preschool, but she managed- amazingly fast, from what her teachers commented. And she discovered that she loved Science and P.E. Maybe because they were the only classes where she could actually stay focused.

She became kind of the class clown, always needing to comment, always needing to poke this kid, or pull this prank, pass this funny drawing of the teacher's butt, because the classes were just so LONG- and her teachers would be very angry with her and threaten with calling her parents. When they thought she wasn't listening, they would talk about her, mention weird long names or random letters, which she never truly caught the meaning of. But like it's been said, school was good with her, because she didn't care whenever such things happened, because she loved being the center of attention between the rest of kids, and because she knew that even if her parents were called, they would completely ignore it. She was used to the spanking, could take the punishment once back at home. It was worth it.

And the teachers never cared enough to actually call them, anyway. She wasn't the only kid with problems.

Despite being pretty popular for her jokes, hilarious dirty jokes for such a young public, her careless attitude, or all those playground fights she won- she never made any real friends during her first years. Just a few kids she'd usually play with during recess but that she never made an effort to get to know, or vice-versa. Their clothes were the right size and were never seen with the same stain in the same week, and when they got off the bus they would walk up to these pristine looking houses of white fences or just trash-clean gardens. She felt like an alien among them, so as long as she could make them laugh, as long as they wanted her to join their games, she was content.

Teachers never understood why she would behave, listen and do her homework when it came to Science, and her answer would always be the same. She liked it. She truly did. She loved dressing up in that white, clean lab coat, to put on the gloves and goggles and watch how the different compounds reacted. How the strong smells replaced the stench she dragged from home wherever she went. Knowing it led to that, reading, paying attention and taking notes was a lot funnier, much more satisfying, and definitely not boring.

As for P.E., running kept her agitated mind at ease, and her skinny frame allowed her to FLY across the field. It felt good to release steam, so good she started running around her house on a daily basis, competing against her own times and pushing herself to do better. Her brother Mike started calling her Squirrel because of that, and it became a family nickname after a while. She didn't mind.

Squirrels were cute and bit so hard they could make you bleed.

The day she saw his father punching her mother right in the teeth, she beat her own running time record. And even though she was panting, and red, and coughing out her lungs, she kept running around the house until she got yelled at and was called back inside. Her mother had locked herself in the bathroom and there was a bloody handprint on the kitchen's counter, but she didn't care.

She had beaten her record.


	2. Countdown

That's what she considered the following years.

She kept doing well in her favorite subjects, kept getting worse at the rest. Only her brother Sam ever bothered to check on her grades, though, so it wasn't the major of her worries. She was far more concerned about being as silent as possible if her father was watching TV with a bottle in his hand or about avoiding her parents' bedroom if she heard her mom whimpering. She would get beaten or locked up in the closet if she ever forgot to take out the trash, or left her shoes lying around. Now those were true problems to worry about, not how little she knew about this president or what she drew in Art class.

But Sam insisted on helping her, either way, which, looking back, was probably the reason why she ever made it to high-school. He was also the only one to ever raise his voice around dad - while the rest of his brothers would stay silent or spend their day out or getting drunk - and sometimes Sam yelled things at him about mom and about the house, so he always had a purple eye or a swollen lip.

But even when he couldn't move his arm or had his head bandaged, he'd take an hour or two from his day to help her with her homework and push her to keep studying, telling her she was very smart and could travel a lot when she was older if she kept it up.

She liked Sam, and that's why she felt so sad the day dad kicked him out. Literally. She helplessly watched from the top of the stairs as dad told him to never come back if he hated this family so much, or else he'd put a bullet through his empty head, and slammed the front door shut. Mom cried and begged for him to let Sam come back, but dad pushed her off and went back to work in the garage.

She couldn't understand why her dad would say that, cause Sam was always talking about how he loved mom and how she had to love her too and be a good daughter. She spent the whole day crying on her mattress, making sure her parents couldn't hear her. That day she started to truly realize this wasn't the way things worked in a family. In a house. Anywhere.

After that she kept trying her best to study and do her homework for Sam, even though there were some days she'd rather spend running around the house when it was too noisy at home to concentrate, or when the rough-housing got out of hand, again. Other times she simply forgot. And even though her grades weren't all that good and her attitude was still considered problematic, she made it through, which was something. She 'borrowed' some books from the school's library, about chemistry and the universe, so she could keep learning at home, at night, when they were all sleeping and she could take the books out from under her mattress and not risk her dad seeing and burning them, like he did with mom's novellas.

But then mom started to sit on her bed when she went to sleep, crying, telling her she was sorry and giving her all the kisses and hugs she had never given her, and being able to read became much harder. She had to change her hiding place pretty damn often, scared her mother would find out about it.

Her mom's behavior was of course the last of her worries. She was pretty damn anesthetized against such shows of affection, considering they were always followed either by yells of incrimination or, if she was lucky, total indifference. She'd just lay there and let her sob her apologies and hug her motionless body until she ran out of tears or she'd play asleep, then her mother would drag her feet out of her room and go downstairs, probably to either drink or sit and stare into space until morning. She never went to check.

Around two months after Sam was kicked out, her dad started to call her to help him with his job, and began to teach her just like he had promised all that time ago. Sometimes it was a fun task, others it was downright stressful, given her dad's anger towards any little slip or error. But after a while she could take out the rusted cylinders or tighten the bolts without any help, spending all those hours patiently dissembling the engines for her father to take them out, and working in the garage, even with him roaming around, became another way to disconnect.

By the time she was 10 she started to fall asleep in the middle of class. At home she used any time available to read and catch up with her homework, and between helping dad in the garage and her mother's nightly rants, sleep hardly ever happened. Given that she was doing better, her teachers never were too harsh about it, but more than once she'd be asked to stay after class as a little punishment, if only to not give the rest of the kids the wrong idea of what class-time was meant for. However, instead of a punishment, those little whiles she would stay after class turned to be a blessing. She had the lab all for herself and, thanks to her notorious interest, her Science teacher was also willing to give her extra classes. She was a nice old lady way too qualified for her job. The days her parents noticed her absences were certainly hell to go through, but she considered it a cheap price to pay for spending time out of that house doing what she liked.

Mrs. Reber, her teacher, would often inquire about her bruises or her oversized clothes, and she felt compelled to tell her the truth, but then she'd remember dad pulling out that gun at a guy two heads taller than him, and she'd bite her tongue. Make up some poor excuse about limited economies and beg her to continue with the lesson before her time after class was over. Maybe the woman perceived the plea in her tone, because she stopped asking after a while. She'd instead bring tupperware after tupperware of food and once she even brushed and cut her tangled mess of a hair as she explained about the chemical equilibrium and its dynamics.


	3. Red road

The summer morning she woke up to find blood all over her mattress, she was pretty damn convinced she was finally breaking inside from all the beatings, until her mind was lucid enough to process the fact she had just reached what they called 'womanhood' in school. Her dad unexpectedly stayed away from the incident. Not a groan, not a fist. Her mother rubbed it clean with water and a strong smelling product in absolute silence as she watched. Then she grabbed her by the arm and dragged her into the bathroom, explaining to her in whispers and hisses that smelled worse than the water in the bucket how to deal with it and to never, ever, trust a man near her, nor her brothers, nor her father, nor ANYBODY.

She was confused and terrified, and terribly paranoid. She felt dirty and guilty and she didn't know why. She threw those clothes away and flipped the mattress and spent the whole day outside, sitting on top of a fallen apart fridge and holding her aching abdomen, nauseated by the smell.

She didn't go through any big change, just some mass in her scarce breasts and maybe some curve here and there, yet she felt so damn self-conscious whenever she noticed more hair or more volume anywhere in her body. For once she was glad that all her clothes were oversized heredities from her siblings.

The only good thing that came out of it - and which didn't last for long - was that her father and brothers didn't pay her that much mind anymore, avoided her to some degree. Even as she worked with her father in the garage, he'd only grunt and hum and gesture and never speak a word.

Summer went by, and Highschool started, and with it everything else came crumbling down. Funny, how hard she tried in the start, remembering Sam's advices, now under a new meaning. _You're smart, can go far, travel a lot._ Get out of here, her brother screamed behind those encouraging words. Don't let them drag you down, make a name out of yourself, and get away from this hell hole. Sometimes, during recess, she'd lean against the school's fence, staring at the block in front of the school and wishing Sam would suddenly appear just around the corner, run towards her and take her with him. Maybe he lived far away from this town, now, in a pretty house with many dogs, she thought to herself. Maybe all that practicing with the sticks and the empty buckets of paint in their yard had paid off, and he was a drummer, in some band, getting famous. Maybe he was dead, rotting away behind some bushes on the roadside, that little voice would retort. And she'd feel the headache coming, the fog thickening, and often get into yet another playground fight, a long side-glance or a bad-timed laugh all she needed as an excuse to start it.

Her mind was constantly buzzing, more than ever before. Her emotions on edge. And as hard as she tried to stay focused in class, to follow the lesson, her inner unrest together with her decreasing reputation with the teachers made it nearly impossible to progress, which only contributed to enhance her agitation. Before, she could find consolation in her classmates' laughs and amused admiration. But her tricks had grown old, overly used, and now both boys and girls were far more worried about their hairs, their looks and their new mobile phones. They would exclude her, exchange whispers and snickers as they pointed at her long, unkempt and frizzy hair and her old XL t-shirts, though they never said anything to her face, afraid as they were of falling victims to her frenzied fists. And she let it be. Preferred the fear over any half-assed attempt to approach her, their obvious pity masked behind staged smiles.

Mr. Reber was the only one that didn't shun her, inquiring with even greater persistence about her life out of school, trying to get her to share her inner turmoil, to understand how that sweet girl avid for knowledge that she had grown to cherish could turn into an uncontrollable whirlwind of swearing and balled fists from one class to the other. But even after her refusals, she'd keep teaching her, patiently and caringly, and sometimes, when the punishment time was over and she got out of the building, she'd spend the whole long trip back home silently sobbing to herself, wondering why she couldn't find that kind of treatment anywhere else.

She was twelve, the morning she woke up to screaming and thrashing and, was that her brother Nick crying? She groggily stepped out of her room to witness what she considered 'the turn-around'.

Her father angrily stepped out of his bedroom, giving her a plain view of Nick hunching over their mother's unmoving body, laying limply on the floor right next to her bed. She saw blood, lots of it, on the sheets, on her mom's arms, or her brother's shirt. She made her way into the room in a haze, staring down at her mother's glazed, red-eyed stare. It didn't look much different than it normally did, whenever she popped way too many pills and sat down on the sofa to stare at a broken TV. Yet she knew, not because of the blood wetting her bare feet, or her father's bellowing, or her brother's cries, or the gashes splitting her wrists open, but because of her eyes, that her mother wasn't there anymore.


	4. Rotten Eggs

There was no funeral, per se. She wasn't sure they even had any relatives to speak of, in the same state or anywhere at all. And her mother never left the house, so no one in town missed her. Dad buried her a few yards behind the house, a hand-made wooden cross mounted on the spot the same day. No name, no date. She and her brothers stood around the mound in silence while their father drawled out a randomly selected Bible verse. Only Nick cried. Her brother Ted was very angry at their mother, had insulted her under his breath. Louis looked daggers at dad the whole time, but said nothing. The rest just listened, heads low and hands in pockets.

And she just stood there for as long as she was told to. Moving her jaw around. Staring at the cross, extremely bugged because the shortest plank was bent to one side. The nails weren't even entirely in. One of them was way too low compared to the rest. How hard could it be to build a wooden cross with a pair of rusty nails? It had been done too hastily, obviously. She was dead, and she was going nowhere, so why not take your time to build a decent cross for the grave? Honestly.

She walked back into the house as soon as the improvised burial was over, still irritated by that hideous sign. Knowing no one else would bother, she filled a bucket with water and got some sponges and started to rub the bedroom's floor clean, putting all her might into the motion. Her brother Louis unexpectedly joined her shortly after, grabbing a sponge without a word. Muffled music ascended from what she supposed was the garage, and her brother quietly grunted through gritted teeth, rubbing harder against the stain. And that's all she remembered about the day.

Her memory skipped to her next day of school. Which she didn't attend. She frankly planned to go to class, but as soon as she got to the building, she stopped dead in her tracks when she reached the outer gate, looked around, contemplating her options, and just- walked away. Bag still on her back.

She had never taken a walk through town before, as unbelievable as it sounded. Only knew a few streets and of course the small central park. So she decided to just walk and see where her steps took her.

That's how she met the troop. She did say earlier that she wasn't the only kid with problems in school, so of course she wouldn't be the only one to choose to skip class. They were mostly of her age, a few of them slightly older. The group was reunited next to some dumpers, leaning against them or sitting on the ground and smoking their cigarettes, a perfect vignette of the rebellious teenager stereotype. Despite not making any real friendship throughout the years, she didn't have an ounce of shyness in her body, and she knew from her experience with classmates how to interact with kids her age, more or less, so it was pretty easy for her to just approach them and start talking.

Funnily enough, she didn't feel out of place with them. It's not that they too had to wear unfitting and dirty clothes, or sported bruises under their long sleeves, but the way they simply let her stay, join the conversation, as if it wasn't a big deal, it made it a lot easier to relax. When she was asked why she was skipping classes, she cut a long story short and told them she didn't do much in them, anyway. When she was asked for a name, she told them her name was Sam. Up to this day she still can't tell why that was the first answer that came to mind. Maybe she was just sick of hearing her actual, boring name on her father's lips. But it had stuck ever since, and it had a nice ring to it, so why not? Being Sam was much better than being Squirrel, the brat, the pest, the good-for-nothing, the scream in her dad's throat.

The troop shared their own stories as well, tales about asshole teachers or over-demanding parents that she listened to with calculated attention, and offered Sam a cig in between. She took it, not because she thought it was cool, or because she didn't want to feel misplaced, but out of pure curiosity. If she had known she would be hacking like an octogenarian by the time she was twenty- she probably would have done it either way. She rejected the beers, though, she had enough alcohol at home and never felt the urge to try it.

The next day she skipped class as well, and the next, and the one after that, and so and so. Going back home by the time school was over kept getting harder by the day. She couldn't stand it, less than she had ever been able to. Helping her dad in the garage, reading behind closed doors, running around the house when her mind started racing- it all stopped working after a while. Her father had also started hitting the bottle 24/7 after her mother's death, so much he hadn't touched a motorcycle in days. So it didn't take long until Sam begun stretching her evenings with these kids. So what if she got screamed at home or received a few punches or pushes. Old tricks. She was practically numb after all those years. She felt confident again, just like when she used to when she could make all her classmates laugh with jokes that scandalized the history teacher.

And deep inside, after her mother died, spending time in that house felt like being inside of a bomb about to go off.

Motivated like that, luring herself a permanent place in the group came naturally. Her fast tongue and strong temper won them over in just a few days. They thought of her as some kind of leader, the embodiment of what they believed to feel like and what they wanted to be like. Sam encouraged those unspoken thoughts by playing heavy pranks on a few teachers, right in their own houses. One of the guys in the group told her that his literature teacher was one of the main reasons he had started skipping classes, so she picked one of her father's heaviest tools and broke the teacher's car windows in front of her loving public, running like hell when the man burst out of the house menacing to call the police. She also used the typical dog turd in the burning bag or rotten eggs raining against their windows. It produced the same desired result and was less risky.

Whenever one of the bigger ones in the troop tried to voice their disagreement on her gained popularity, she employed a well aimed fist and several effective threats, and soon they all learned to swallow their goddamn tongues when they realized that no matter how hard they hit back, it only seemed to further stir her anger. And her talking, oh, she could talk for years. Rant about everything and anything, and they would feed from it like babies from their mother's tit. She didn't even know where she got half that stuff from, but she found herself believing it as well, as if all that philosophy had been waiting to break the surface of her subconscious, waiting for the moment it wouldn't be kicked back down or berated by a hammered parent. And she probably learnt how to work her way around people during her time in that little group. What string to pull and what rope to fasten. When exactly was it time to step away for a second and take a deep breath, so her grisly threats would stay as empty warnings.

One of the girls, a silent sweet thing two years younger, with hair as red and fake as her nails stayed always closer than the rest, trotting after Sam when she suddenly decided they bored her and wanted some time alone, asking too many questions and being a little pest. Her name was Beverly, but she called herself Ly. And she was her first best friend. How could she not? No matter how hard she snapped at her or how many times she would tell her to leave her alone, whenever the smog behind her eyes got too thick, the chick didn't give up. Had the patience of a saint. Or maybe she was just that desperate for company. Whatever the case, she learned to think of her as a likeable bug. And Ly learned to stay silent when her scowl deepened. Other times she would eat her ear with rambles about her 'original characters', the books she was currently reading or how much her mother hated her colorful mane.

Ly was the one to bring a little bag of cannabis, stolen from her older brother when he had visited from college, looking at her with shiny eyes, expecting her praise. That night they all sat around a drafty fire and let one of the older boys roll a joint they passed from hand to hand. When her turn came, she almost choked on the thing. She commented it was shit and it did nothing. But then, about ten minutes later, everything was _amazing_.

She laughed her ass off when one of the kids started screaming and trying to climb up a wall. She kept laughing just by looking at the fire. She got up and danced with Ly, holding her hands as they stumbled through the field. Screamed at the top of her lungs, facing the sky, and burst out laughing again. One of the big boys she had beaten just a week earlier held her up by the waist and swung her around, elevating her euphoria. She couldn't even remember his name, but she remembered his lips tasted like cigars and chocolate candy. It was a clumsy kiss, but it just felt so right and good and she never wanted it to stop. Her mother's words were shoved to the back of her mind, replaced by happiness and wonderful sensations. When she told Ly she also exploded in laughs and poked her shoulder every goddamn minute for the rest of the night. Normally she would have grabbed her wrist before she could do it for a third time, but that night she just didn't give a shit. What a wonderful feeling, and how little did it last.

Taking advantage of her friendship with Ly, Sam claimed the bag for herself once they were done tripping. The girl was fine with it, of course. Sam felt like a major asshole for the way she treated her whenever she was a bit out of it - not that she ever told her - so she'd often take walks with the quiet girl, only the two of them, and share a fair amount of thoughts and pot with her. It was her way of saying 'you're okay'. Sometimes Ly would sneak Sam into her house, like one would a stray dog, and they'd spend the evening in her room, a small space full of little figures and posters of big eyed girls, door locked, watching all the movies Sam had ever missed onn Ly's small but defined TV screen.

Ly was the only one out of the group that eventually knew about her love for science and its magic. It wasn't intentional, it's not that she sat her down and explained the amount of books on the subject she had devoured or how she actually missed her classes with Mrs. Reber. They were sitting on a park bench, sharing a cigar, and Ly just happened to tell Sam her reasons for skipping school, the bullying she had been subjected to because she was overweight and had an odd taste in clothes. Three kids in particular had made a point of making her time in school a living hell, and the _'straw that broke the camel's back' _- Sam hadn't heard that one before, loved it - was the day those three kids grabbed her notebook, where she kept all those silly stories of hers, and ripped it to shreds.

'So knock their teeth in.' Sam would drawl between her teeth. And Ly would laugh, shaking her head, saying she wasn't strong like her. And consequently, Sam took matters into her own hands.

Ammonia was easy to find, it was precisely what she had mixed with water to clean after her mother's mess. Ly brought the matches, excited to see what exactly Sam was planning. They reunited the money together to buy a giant plastic bottle of water that they emptied on the park's grass. She worked her magic behind Ly's backyard, on the other side of the fence, carefully cutting the heads off the matches and putting them inside the bottle along with a couple spoons of ammonia. When Ly covered her mouth and nose, commenting on the awful smell, Sam licked her lips, grinning like a madman.

'If you think this is bad, just wait to see the _real_ thing.'

Tricking them was piece of cake. All Sam had to do was approach the school fence during recess, three days later, after Ly identified them out from behind a corner, and let them have a peek of the weed. She told them where to meet her to get a free sample and maybe do business if they liked it. And the dumbfucks fell for it. They were pointed to the public bathroom in the gas station bordering town. Sam was waiting for them, the bottle on the floor right behind her. As soon as they were all inside, she held her breath, uncapped it in one swift motion and ran the fuck out, pushing them away and closing the door behind her. She pulled from her side, planting her feet on each flank of the door for major leverage, grinding her teeth in a wild smile while Ly cracked up at their pathetic wailing and coughing. They gave up trying to open the door, instead punching it, screaming for someone to get them out. She and Ly waited five minutes total before they fled away from the scene, tears of laughter running down their cheeks.

Ly hugged her without warning, screaming how much she loved her. And even though Sam didn't return the hug, chuckling as she gently pushed away from the embrace, she couldn't hold herself from clinging onto those words like chewing gum to a boot.

That goddamn little gnat got her talking about the future, about how they were both going to leave that place, travel from state to state in a flaming car, like those chicks from that movie that Ly loved so much and had made her seen a thousand times- except they wouldn't jump off a cliff, of course, they would be smarter than that. She would tell Ly she could be a writer and wouldn't have to stand being compared to her older brother all the time by a mother who couldn't even stop her father from abandoning them, and the girl would nod in agreement, smiling widely.

They would leave everyone behind and start a new life far from there. Sam would fix motorcycles, have her own lab in their basement and all the time in the world to do what she liked. And blah blah blah, and so and so. How easy it was to dream back then, even in the midst of all that bullshit.

If only things had stayed the same.


	5. Biology

The year and a half she spent with the troop she hardly showed up in class. She would randomly attend some - avoiding the lab and Mrs. Reber all together - the mornings when their company was more irritating than pleasing, thinking of her time during lessons as a diversion and little more. Her well-known teachers seemed almost relieved with her absences, no longer obliged to stand her comments or her distracting behavior. Additionally, the rare times she would appear at her seat she seemed pretty relaxed, as if whatever she had been wasting her time with out of the building had imbibed all that unyielding energy that normally accompanied her. There were no detentions, and when she suddenly disappeared during recess, they turned a blind eye and continued with their schedules.

Things were different back then, at least where she lived. When she was younger she didn't notice that kind of stuff happening around her, but as she grew older, she realized the awful system her school was ran by. Most of her teachers probably approved of physical punishment as a way to raise your children. They didn't call the social services if a kid stopped showing up in class, cause half of the population in that zone were high-school dropouts or had never even been to school, so it wasn't unexpected. And if a kid misbehaved, there were at least five detentions before they bothered calling any legal tutor. Maybe if she had been born a few years later, or somewhere else, her life would have been different. They would have called as soon as she had started getting in fights or falling asleep in class, and she would have been taken away. But in that time, and in that place, people didn't care in the least.

Besides, the times they had tried contacting her parents there had been no answer, and she had been the one to handle in all the required paperwork to start her secondary education studies, a wobbly signature from her father all they needed for a confirmation, so why bother further? If they had to run after every single parent that didn't respond their calls or that didn't come to talk about their children's grades, they would run out of time from their busy agendas.

When she was told she would have to repeat the grade, because of all the classes and exams she had missed, she merely shrugged. But then she was informed that they needed to talk with one of her parents, a required formality, and that's when she started to worry. They failed to contact them through phone, so they gave her the task of transmitting the message. Which she never did.

It was a hard blow to take, but she realized that no matter how much she struggled, she couldn't stand to her brother Sam's expectations. She had tried, and for every step she made, a new obstacle would pop up. So she gave up. Would rather spend her days with the troop, also familiar with neglect and detentions, rather than giving her father another excuse for a beating, especially when he had never showed a minimal of interest in anything associated with school.

She could find a way of making money, start saving to get the fuck out of that place, take Ly with her. And with that train of thought was how she dropped from highschool. She never talked with Mrs. Reber about it. It was hard to admit, but she felt majorly embarrassed whenever she thought of facing the one person who had believed in her capacity, apart from her vanished brother.

Instead of sweating over it, she focused on the upcoming events, like an entire summer with the gang and her 14th birthday. She had never really celebrated it before, only her brother Sam had sometimes congratulated her on the day and gifted her a dedicated drum-solo. But since the troop found out about it, it had been a recurring subject, voicing out their plans of making it the biggest party she had ever seen in her life- easy enough achievement with someone who had never been to one in the first place, and Ly would tease her all the time with the gifts she had already thought of getting her.

She took all her books and hid them one by one under her mattress, careful to not pile them up so her spine didn't break. That's where they would stay until she could put them in a bag along with all her belongings, she swore, and went back to town, a confident smile at the ready.

Another summer went by, her wretched life at home overshadowed by the days spent with Ly and the rest, the shared joints by the fire and the unplanned escapes to the nearest lake for a fresh bath and many idiotic games.

Even though her 'episodes' frequency had seriously increased over time, she managed to conceal them behind a playful facade or by releasing steam in a provoked fight with any of the older guys. Weed had stopped working after a while, sometimes sending her into very terrible trips that stayed with her for weeks, so she switched to what she never thought of trying and started consuming bottles of beer whenever she was in town. They weren't as effective, but the right amount managed to give her that artificial sense of relief she looked for, and the perfect excuse to explain her sudden changes of mood or her escalating irritability. When a few kids from the group stopped hanging out with them, apparently sick of her attitude, she made sure to show no concern and dismissed them as chickenshits. Five persons were more than enough to have a fun time with.

Regardless of the isolated incidents relating to her emotional state, in just three months she had managed to put behind all her academic worries, and when they walked back to town after an evening by the lake, and she saw the biker gangs speeding by, she would grow more and more convinced of taking over her dad's job, who was now too entertained with the booze to even remember how to hold a wrench, and start like that her life as a mechanic.

September came and for the first time in her life she couldn't wait for her birthday. And when the day finally arrived, they didn't let her down. They set up lots of small lanterns around the pond they normally frequented, and brought tons of liquor and bags of chips. There was music and dancing, and they sat her in front of an improvised birthday cake, which was a muffin with a stripped candle on top, singing a rather original version of 'happy birthday' that sent her into a fit of snickers. Ly was the only one with a proper gift, a hand-made box containing at least six different colors of nail polish and a CD from that band she loved, 'Love Fist', which Sam had never really liked, but that in the form of a gift was suddenly the best thing ever.

She assaulted Ly with one long bone-crushing hug, letting go only when she had full control of the water banking behind her eyes and giving her one violent pat on the back to take emotion away from the scene. Sam made her promise she would paint her nails that same week, matching Ly's.

Had she known what that week awaited for her, she would have stretched the party forever, force them all to stay and keep bringing supplies. Settle down right by the lake, sleeping on bushes, and living off beer and cheap snacks. How awesome would that have been?

But as fate decreed otherwise, after a long night of bonding under the moonlight, she made her way back home, carrying with her a bag full of trash food and Ly's presents. So hblissfully happy she felt after the party that she almost missed the unfamiliar car parked to the side of the lane, situated downhill from her family's land. A small double door thing with an air freshener hanging from its rearview mirror. That didn't fit the usual black vans or pickup trucks that sometimes visited her father for work-related matters, and she stared stupefied at the vehicle for at least a few minutes before she finally recognized the license plate number, and she could have died on the spot.

Sam could hear her father barking long before she slammed the front door open, startling an already disturbed Mrs. Reber, who gaped at her in disbelief. Her father was already ten different tones of red, two of her brothers at his sides to keep him from falling over the older woman. Her beloved teacher had started saying something to her, ignoring her dad's bellowing, but something took over Sam the moment she saw her standing in the middle of the filthy corridor, immediately dropping her bag on the front porch and reaching her in two long strides, roughly grabbing at the woman's arm and mercilessly dragging her outside, down the hill, to her car.

Her voice thundered across the surrounding lands, screaming at the confused and scared elder what she thought was the only way to save her from her father's drunken wrath. Things like who the fuck did she think she was to come here and stick her nose in her family's life, to never come back again unless she wanted to get her every creaking joint broken and to forget about calling the police least she wanted her house set on fire the moment after.

She saw tears in the woman's eyes when she looked up, her modest clothes in disarray and her round glasses hanging off her nose, after Sam had thrown her onto the driving seat, closing the door with a loud bang. The girl held her stare for a brief second, begging with her eyes for her to just leave and not get involved in this bullshit, before she turned around to pick a stone that she threw against the car's window, yelling at her to fucking go already.

It took her three rocks to make the woman start the car. Mrs. Reber didn't peel her eyes away from her even as she maneuvered the car back on the road, and only broke eye contact to at last drive away from the property.

Nothingness. That's what filled her as she watched the car disappear after a pronounced curve. Her jaw moved from side to side, her teeth pinching her inner cheek with enough force to make it sting. She walked the distance back home in absolute silence, her eyes never lifting from the ground. She didn't need to look to know her father was waiting for her, his fat, wide mass covering the entrance. It was impossible to ignore his pig-like breathing, palpitating with rage.

One step away from him, she raised her face, opening her mouth and blabbing some poor excuse or apology, she couldn't remember. In the blink of an eye his hand was pulling at her hair, lifting her unfortunate ill-favored frame up and into the house. She had just enough time to identify some of her siblings' voices before his strong arm swung her around and against the wall, her left temple colliding first and turning her whole world black.

Next thing she remembered was a loud ringing, and the muffled screams from her brothers waving in and out of her head. She saw blurry shadows moving above her, around her, as her sight drifted back and forth from complete darkness. When she came back to herself, she was being carried upstairs by Louis, whose nose bled profusely. He dropped her on the grimy mattress and closed the door, screaming back at their father the very minute after he left.

She sat there for, hours, probably. Maybe minutes? Her left cheek was uncomfortably humid, and when she felt around, her lazy hand came back into view covered in blood. She had no mirror or any reflective surface in the room to check, but she guessed with unfitting tranquility that there was probably a slash where her head had hit the wall.

Just another scar for the list, right?

Louis came back after god knows how long or how little, she was knocked off her temporal awareness there. He wiped her face with a wet towel and cleaned the wound with what was probably alcohol, cause it stung like a bitch. Then he told her in a flat tone to stay in her room, to not make dad angrier than he was, and left again.

She should have gotten out of there the moment he left. Pick up her stuff and run out the front door to never come back again, but- she was scared. Scared, can you believe it? Frozen in place, that's the right term. Ever since the moment she had seen Mrs. Reber standing up to her father, she had been drained of any freaking fuel. It was something she did not see coming, something she was not ready for. She had on cloud nine after the party. Her barriers, always risen and ready to face the enemy, they had been down. She had taken a bullet to the head- in more ways than one, and now she didn't know what to do. What to expect.

So she laid there. Laid there until it was silent at home. Laid there when the door to her room creaked open, and then closed again. Laid there as the weighty steps from her father approached her bed. Laid there as he prolonged her name in a raspy whisper, hollow apologies, the sound dragging itself over his repugnant tongue and across the room.

Laid there as his gross weight fell on the mattress and his greasy hands travelled all the way from her legs to under her shirt.

What happened afterwards, she was thankful to not remember clearly. Similar to her years as a toddler, it was all flashes. But she recognized enough from the memories to know it was comparable to watching him work on the bikes, all those years ago. Noisy, stinky and, just like when he would kick her away from the vehicle he was working on, painful. And she just laid there. Motionless. Wishing she could play asleep to make him leave, like she did to her mother.

Once he was done, he placed a sloppy kiss on her forehead and promised that things were going to be alright from then on. He got up with a grunt and left the room, not troubling himself with closing the door.

And she laid there.

It's truly impossible to describe the following events in an orderly fashion. She knows it happened after she noticed a bump under her back. She just wanted to lay there and maybe never wake up again, and the bump was in the way. So she dragged herself off the mattress, ignoring the raw aching of her limbs, and lifted it high enough to find the source of her discomfort.

Her books.

The books she promised to take with her when the day she would put all her stuff in a bag and leave this place.

The day things would be alright.

Except now they would never be alright. Would they?

He said things would be alright from now on. What the fuck could he mean by that?

Alright as in 'I'll make you my new punching bag'? 'I'll do to you what I did to your mother'? 'I get off punching pretty faces and then ravaging what little life they got'?

But he would NOT make her his bitch.

He would NOT.

Her books were under the mattress.

The biggest one had been the bump under her back.

A giant-ass volume of pointy corners.

Her father was still pacing through the corridor when she got out of her room. He turned around at the sound of her bare feet just as the corner of her biology volume smashed into his right eye. He screamed like the pig he was, falling on his ass and reaching to cover his eyes, but she struck again, hitting right above it. And she struck him again, as he laid on the floor, his hands still groping for support and she fucking hit him again, trying her best to penetrate into his alcohol-embalmed brain as he convulsed- and again, and again, and again, her own roaring going straight to her temples, her arms vibrating with every new collision.

She only stopped when the book slid from her fingers, now stiff and unresponsive. She was out of breath, staring down at her achievement, his face hardly recognizable under all that blood and slices of skin, when she felt a familiar tingle on her nape that made her turn around to the sight of her brother Louis at the top of the stairs.

Dumbfounded, he only took a fast view of the scene before he held her stare and gave her the one and only advice she had ever taken seriously.

'Run. Run and don't come back.'

And that she did. She grabbed the first pair of pants she saw and ran out of the house, lucid enough still to pick up her forgotten bag full of snacks and Ly's gifts from the front porch.

All those years of running around the house served her to arrive in town in only just ten minutes. Her feet had taken the wheel, letting her panic and nearly hyperventilate as they made their way to Ly's house.

Because she would be leaving town, possibly forever, and she couldn't do that without at least saying goodbye to her best friend.


	6. Sloshy

'This next song, was written for my one and only, my candy girl, my beloved Beverly!'

Jezz Torrent locked eyes with her and started singing, his dreamy British accent sending shivers down her spine and making her insides tingle with a throbbing sensation that in dreams was far from awkward or uncomfortable.

One heartbeat later she was in his arms, his sweaty, slim and pale arms, and he leaned closer, puckering his _luscious_ lips to kiss her. Ly closed her eyes and stuck out her tongue, panting at the imminence of her first kiss.

Instead of the soft feeling of his mouth on hers, there was a hard rapping on her forehead. Her eyes snapped open and she held up her hands to protect herself from Jezz's knuckles as they mercilessly pounded on her head over and over and over-

She awoke with a start to the sound of someone knocking on her window. Propping herself up on her elbows, still shaken by the outcome of what had started as a promising, _super hot_ dream, she took a squint at the stained glass. Even without her glasses there was no mistaking the frizzly and chaotic silhouette of Sam's long mane, crouched under the sill. Well, now _this _was a new one. She exhaled a long, tired sigh, stretching her arm to turn on the lamp, her hand jerking away from it when Sam angrily slammed an open palm against the glass, gesturing first an effusive 'NO' and then briskly waving a 'COME HERE'.

Ly threw the blankets aside, hauling herself up and dragging her feet to the window, feeling around its frame before she managed to unlock and open it. Sam was kneeling in front of her, only leaving to view her head and her hands, resting on the window's sill. She could have laughed at the sight and made the puppet joke if she didn't feel so damnably exhausted.

'Sam, it's like... 3 in the morning...' she muttered, rubbing her tired eyes and realizing way too late she had probably smeared the make-up she forgot to take off before going to bed.

'I know, I know, _shut up_, just...' Sam patted the air, her breathing deep and ragged. 'This is _important_.'

'Alright...' the red haired girl shrugged, resignedly. '... what's up?'

'I just...' she trailed off nervously, emitting a raspy snarl and looking aside and falling into a restless silence, the crickets and her shuddering breathing resonating in the small room. Ly failed to discern her expression, shielded as it was from the moonlight floating in the night sky, right behind her, and blurred by her poor eyesight. She gave her at least half a minute to reply before she spoke again, trying to sound as patient as her exhaustion allowed her.

'Saaaam...?'

'Yeah, okay! Just... give me a minute here, fuck...' she rested her forehead on the ledge, breathing deeply, and Ly knew in that moment that something was off. It wasn't like she had never seen her friend having a rough time. Ly had been there for her after a bad trip, or the times after a particularly intense quarrel with any other kid. The girl made it nearly impossible to see beyond her thick barriers, but Ly, drawn by that untamed savagery that she oozed, had been persistent enough to witness those rare times when, after snapping with excessive cruelty at the mildest joke from one of their common friends and stomping away from the scene, she had hidden behind the nearest corner, fiercely squeezing her face and muttering curses directed at her own persona.

She had also stood by Sam's side during her first intoxication, caused by at least 6 bottles of beer in one hour, holding back her hair as she barfed the contents of her stomach until there was just bile left. Ly had turned to leave after a certainly uncalled tactless comment from her part - something she had learned to ignore after a while - but the girl had reached for her wrist, her grip tightening as she mumbled an apology and asked her, a subdued beg in her tone, to stay.

She had truly seen more facets from Mad Sam than any other kid from their troop could ever dream of, but _this _one, was foreign territory. Ly had always thought of her comrade as something leaning closer to a beast than an actual human being. So her actual position could positively be described as that of a wounded animal. Shrinking from her view in a guarded attitude.

'Sam? Is everything okay?' she carefully inquired, taking a step closer.

Her friend visibly recoiled, lifting her gaze. 'Yes! Yes, I...' she staggered, her hands trembling, 'Look, I gotta go. Right now.'

'O-kaaaay...' Ly tilted her head, her worries soon fading away at the response, 'Sam, are you... high, or something...?'

The girl anxiously huffed, angrily whispering. 'No! I mean, as in... leaving town, okay? I'm leaving, not coming back.'

'Wowowowow... wait, what?' the red haired girl snapped awake, shaking her head, 'What are you talking abo-'

'Shhhhh!'

She lowered her voice, having forgotten for a second about the time and her mother sleeping in the room next to them, and asked again, leaning closer. '_What are you talking about?_'

'I'm saying that I'm leaving, Ly. _Leaving_, _town_, what is it that you don't get from that statement?'

'No, I mean-'

'The _leaving _part, or the _town_ part?'

'I mean why-'

'Or was it the _not coming back_?'

'Stop! Stop it, that is not what I meant and you know it...!' she retorted, perhaps for the first time ever since she had met the irritable brunette. Mocking commentary was her way of pushing away an undesired subject, and she was not buying it this time.

Sam surprisingly shrunk back into her guarded position, almost apologetically, without a counterattack to throw back. Had it been anybody else, she would have ruled it out as bluffing born from a random bout of angst and gone back to bed, but Sam? When she said things she _meant _them. Like that time she said she would climb the highest tree and jump in the pond from the top, and had proudly walked with a limp for a whole week right afterwards.

Of course she knew that kind of behavior would eventually lead to bigger troubles, but, to leave town? To vanish from their lives? All at once the current circumstances started to sink into her dozing brain. The fact she was knocking on her window at 3 in the morning, refusing to be completely seen and with what she now took for a bag on her back. And she refused to accept it.

'Sam, why? Why would you have to leave? What's going on?' she insisted, frowning as she tried to see in the dark, wishing she remembered where she had dropped her glasses.

'I just... have to, okay?'

'No? No, it's not okay?' she asked, matter-of-factly. 'What happened? And why- why are you hiding like that- what's, going, on?' she hissed, doing a little, anxious jump with every word.

She seemed to considerate something for an instance. Ly could hear her sucking air, ready to speak but failing to find the words, until she finally responded, her voice strained. 'I just... I fucked up. Okay? I fucked up big time. I gotta go.'

Ly moved her head from one side to the other, puzzled. 'Fucked... fucked up, what does that even-'

'**Ly**.' she growled, and Ly closed her mouth instinctively. '... drop it. Just... I have, to leave. Period.', she inhaled deeply once again, tapping her fingers. 'I came because... because I wanted to say goodbye.'

Ly studied her, astounded, gaping as she thought of what she could possibly say to all of that.

'Do you... does it have to do with Mr. Brown's pool? Cause that asshole has nothing on you, Sam.'

'No, no, it's nothng like that...'

'Anybody could have done it- hell, anybody with a garden could be a suspect! I've seen my neighbor buy fertilizer, like, ten times a week!'

'Ly, for fuck's sake.'

'And there were five of us with you, what's he gonna do, knock door to door 'til he identifies each one of us?' she laughed, a single bark, 'I don't think so!'

'Ly, it has NOTHING-' the red haired girl cowered at her abrupt raise of tone, 'to DO, with Mr. Brown. Got it?' Sam held up a hand before the girl could voice her rebuttal, 'It has NOTHING, to do with anything you know about, okay? You have no fucking idea of what has happened in the last few hours and I want it to stay that way, so will you PLEASE... please, just...' she let out a quivering sigh, rubbing at her temple, 'It's final, Ly. End of story...'

She heard Ly whimpering softly, and made a huge effort to not leave right then and there. Her good, only true friend's voice cracked as she spoke.

'But you can't, Sam. Y-you can't leave. I...' she weakly opened her arms, to highlight her next words, 'I don't want you to leave...!'

The wild brunette gulped slowly, striving to sound resolute, 'But I have to.'

'No, no...'

'Listen, you can't tell anybody you have seen me, understand?'

'Hmm...' she shook her head, sniffling loudly.

'Ly, I haven't been here. Repeat it.'

'Sam, please...'

'Beverly. I haven't been here. Say it.' she muttered, ignoring her aching chest.

Ly sobbed quietly, rubbing her cheek on her palm.

'Say it...'

'Y-you were nnn-n-never h-here...'

Sam closed her eyes, nodding lightly. 'Okay. Okay, say it again.'

'You w-were never he-ere.'

She struggled to swallow the lump in her throat, still nodding. 'Again.'

'You were never h-here.'

'Good. Yes, good.' she sniffled once, moving her jaw around. 'Good, just... if anyone asks, just say that. You haven't seen me since the... the party, okay?'

Her friend gave a downhearted nod, still crying to herself.

'Stop that, it'll be fine.'

'No.'

'_Yes_, it will. You will be okay.'

She wiped at her eyes, lifting her dimly lit face. 'I'll miss you, Sam. You're my only friend...!'

Sam fell into silence once more, unmoving as she - supposedly - stared at her.

'I am also an asshole.' she boldly stated.

'What? No...!'

'_Yes_, yes I am. I know it, you know it, everybody knows it. Listen to me, Ly...' she lifted herself up a little, only up to her shoulders. 'Do not _ever_ let anybody give you shit. Okay? I won't be here to stop them, so you gotta learn to fight back.'

'Sam, you-'

'No, Ly, I mean it. You deserve better than all of that. You're like, super smart and you have all those cool stories in your head waiting to be shown, yeah? So show them! If they spit on you, you spit back. If they touch you, you _break their fucking noses_.'

The red haired girl choked out a low, mirthless laugh, quietly sobbing again. 'You know I can't...'

'Bullshit. You've dealt with me for how long? They are _nothing _compared to that. You just need to take the jump, yeah? Like mixing sodium and water. Just a little step and, boom! You got it.' she eagerly panted. 'Promise me you'll do it, or else I swear, I'll come back just to kick your ass, man.'

Ly inspired through her runny nose. 'W-Where are you going?'

'Huh?'

'Where are you going? Have you thought about that?'

Sam blinked, biting her inner cheek. 'No, I... I'll just walk. You know? Just... take the road and see where it gets me...'

'... I think, I think San Fierro isn't that far, but I'm not sure.'

'Yeah. Yeah, maybe I'll go there.' she nodded. 'Sounds good.'

Both girls became quiet after that empty affirmation, the biggest one shifting her weight nervously, not knowing too well where to go from there.

'Well-' Sam started, getting back on her feet to leave, but Ly cut her sentence short. 'Wait! It's... it's cold, right?' she sniffled, 'I-It's cold outside.'

'Uhm...' Sam hesitated. She felt _nothing_ at the present moment. 'Maybe. A bit, I guess.'

'Okay...' she trailed off, pacing about her room and looking for something. She picked up a piece of clothing from the floor, kicking away a pair of shoes, and came back to the window, offering it to Sam. 'Here.' She spread it open, and Sam discerned the logo from Ly's favorite 'Love Fist' t-shirt. 'It's not much, but, always better than what you're wearing.' she said, nodding at Sam's tank top. 'My mom put away all my winter clothes this summer...'

The brunette observed the black shirt for what felt like forever, before reaching out to grab it. She held it close to her chest, staring down at it. '... you know I don't like them.' she whispered, twiddling with the fabric.

'Oh...' she wiped her nose, fidgeting nervously. 'M-Maybe I have something else...'

Before she could finish her sentence, Sam had scooped herself up on the window's sill and her dark silhouette had leaned forward, planting a light, faint kiss on Ly's mouth, a humid kiss that left behind a faint metallic taste, lasting but a second before her friend retreated back outside, lowering her head. The red haired girl stood frozen in place, knocked off her faculties by the unexpected action.

'Take care of yourself, Ly.' Sam murmured, holding onto her bag's straps and wheeling around towards Ly's back fence.

Ly watched as her skinny figure decomposed between the clouds of her limited vision, jumping up and disappearing behind the long, white blur that was the fence. The tears streamed down her cheeks, even though she was no longer sobbing. She took a few wavering steps towards the bed, needing to sit down, and screamed at the top of her lungs when the sole of her right foot fell with a loud crack on something pointy and sharp.

The pain made her stagger back, holding onto the window frame as she held up her feet with the other hand, her fingers touching wet.

The lights of her room turned on all of a sudden, temporarily blinding her watering eyes.

'Oh my god, Evey, what happened?' the voice of her mother sounded strangely remote, and her confused mind needed at least a few seconds before she could process that there was a piece of glass protruding out her bleeding foot.

'I-I...' she stammered. Her mother was at her side in the blink of an eye, helping her stand up.

'Tks, I knew this would happen one of these days, I just knew it. Oh, and they cost a fortune the pair...!' she cried, looking down at the broken mess her glasses were now, on the floor right by Ly's nightstand. 'Alright, nevermind- let's just, clean you up, honey... oh my god, the window too? Jesus Christ, Beverly!'

The girl turned around to look at it, still in a trance, her eyes widening at the sight, unnoticed until now under the absence of light. 'Uh...'

'Come on, honey, to the bathroom, we got to get that out.'

She let her mother hold her up and lead her out of the room, her eyes still fixated on the window as she neared the doorway. Darting from its exterior sill to the side of the glass that faced out, both covered in bloody handprints that, she knew for a fact, weren't her own.


	7. Hitchhiking

After having tried her fair amount of video-games, many years after leaving town, one could easily compare her _excursion_ to the moment the main protagonist of any RPG take their first step into the black, undiscovered portion of the world map. Everything was new, and therefore, fear-inspiring.

Of course her on-going anxiety had a lot to do with the impression. The recent events flowed all mixed together in a violent torrent of conflicted emotions, banging against the walls of her skull and pushing on her eyes, making them feel heavy and lethargic. There was a particular needle in said cluster, longer and bathed in something definitely _hazard_, puncturing each one of her thoughts and spreading a venom that so far she was managing to pay no mind to, but that would have to be acknowledged sooner or later.

Her head snapped in every direction whenever she heard anything similar to a car's buzzing or the sound of a siren in the distance. She walked on the right side of the road, in the first direction she had thought of, darkness and rural lands surrounding her.

Her feet were sore, having been walking and running in the same worn out and sweated sneakers for two days on a row, and her body had turned into one, big cramp, but she didn't stop not even after the sky turned a greyish blue and the sun started to shyly appear on the horizon.

A few cars had already passed her by in the last hour, not even slowing down for a second. The sixth of them, a pinkish pickup truck was the only one to actually notice her, gradually reducing its speed until it matched her sluggish pace. She picked the noise of the window going down, and she heard someone speaking to her, making Sam slowly turn her face to the side.

'Dear god, girl, what happened to 'ya?'

It was a man in his late fifties, dressed in jeans and a hunting vest, the whole lower half of his face displaying a full brown beard, already plagued with white hairs.

He stopped the car after his second call was again met with a blank stare, getting out and putting his hands on both her shoulders, asking her if all that blood was hers before he noticed the ugly looking gash on the side of her forehead. He gently guided her into his car, fastening her belt and rushing to his seat. They were picking up speed again when he commented with what he thought was a reassuring tone that they could get to an hospital in 20 minutes top and not to worry, moment in which Sam finally snapped back to reality, shaking her head.

'No, no. No hospitals.' she babbled.

'Wuh?'

She muttered the same words again, and the man stared into her eyes, trying to read from them the reasons for her request, maybe, holding back a curse and almost killing them both when the girl suddenly lurched forwards, exorcising everything that had happened in the last day all over his car's mat.

She apologized later, after a fast stop to put away the floor covering and being told by the man, introduced as Will, that they would be driving to his wife's diner instead.


	8. Pine Pie

Willy drove his old carcass for at least 20 more minutes before they finally made it. She looked out the window the whole trip, drinking every new inch of territory, every location they would drive by, every new face she saw inside other cars, and letting the artificial pine scent from Willy's air freshener invade her nostrils, wishing it could drown the unwanted odor that latched onto her very soul, unwilling to let go. She remembered it as if it was yesterday. A cheap, extravagant smell, yet the mere recollection still served to calm her temper almost a decade later.

He awkwardly tried to make conversation, to get her to explain the origins of her wound, the blood splatters, the bruises on her wrists that she noticed only after the old man mentioned them. But Sam remained quiet, letting her hair cover her face and moving her jaw around.

The place lined the horizon hardly a minute after Willy took the exit, foreshadowed by merely two symbols that obviously meant 'food' and 'telephone'. It looked just like in the movies she had shared with Ly, with the steel exterior and the neon boards, except this one had more than one floor. The biggest sign loomed over the place, placed at the highest end of a tall metal post put in the ground a few yards before the actual restaurant, reading 'Nora's Diner' in what surely were the brightest green and blue letters at night. Willy drove around the back and parked the truck next to some dumpsters, asking her in the kindest manner to wait in the car.

She remembered staring at the faint outline of Mount Chiliad, scraping the sky behind the diner, as she waited for Willy to come back. There was that little voice again, biting its way through the snarled mess that was her mind, nagging her about how stupid she could be to just get in the car of a stranger and let him take her wherever, considering all that she had been through. Her mother's voice rose from the grave to join it, again hissing into her ear how she could trust no one, how everybody was out to hurt her, her putrid breath corrupting the fresh aroma to evergreen from the air freshener and making her eyes water and constricting her throat.

She exhaled a trembling breath she didn't realize she was holding when her view was suddenly obstructed by yet another new face of big brown eyes and full lips. The woman stared down at her with a cautious smile that didn't reach her eyes, opening the door and leaning down so their faces were at the same level. She wore the most colorful clothes Sam had ever seen all at once on someone, standing out against her dark, smooth skin, and spoke with great care, maintaining a hushed pitch with every word.

'Hello, hun... My name's Nora. My husband here tells me you're hurt, but you don't want to go to the hospital.' she tilted her head, pursing her lips, and Sam saw Willy standing beside her, arms crossed and wearing a worried frown. 'What's your name, sweetheart?'

Her eyes darted from Willy to the woman called Nora, slowly, locking eyes with her and trying like Willy did earlier, to read from them her true intentions.

It was her natural perfume what made her inner alarms decrease in volume. She smelt good. Nora always smelt good. To almond scented shampoo and pie just out of the oven. It got mixed with Willy's pine, taking over her own stench and her mom's booze breath, soothing deeper wounds and loosening her white-knuckled grip on the seat.

'It's okay.' she nodded, widening her eyes, 'You can tell me. I just want to help you, hun.'

She gulped down, feeling the saliva travelling down her rough, sore throat. Her lips dried up the moment she opened her mouth to speak, and what came out was a raspy, croaky version of her usual voice.

'Sam.'

Both their faces showed evident relief with her reply, but Nora kept prodding.

'Alright, Sam. I need you to tell me what happened. Understand? Cause if you're hurt, we _need _to get you to an hospital, quickly. You understand?'

She shut down again, holding Nora's gaze and reflexively moving her jaw from one side to the other. It was just so damn confusing, and frightening. So scary, to think that if she said the wrong thing, maybe, she would be taken back. Punished for what she had done. Faced with the consequences.

Nora waited for a reply, observing her every gesture with attention. Willy let his arms fall to the sides, sighing. 'Eleanor, I don't think she's in the right state to speak.'

His wife looked over her shoulder, her kind tone acquiring a new hint of determination. 'She needs time, Will. She's obviously been through something.'

'Yes, I know...! That's why maybe we should just... call the police. They should know how to help the kid better than we do, don't you think?'

Nora didn't reflect on his idea, instead turning to face the girl again, having heard her sudden gasp for air. Sam's eyes were wide with fear, placed on Willy, her mouth hanging slightly open.

It was then that she recognized Nora as one unique individual, cause with one fast studying look, she succeeded at what neither Sam or Willy had been able to accomplish. Read whatever was going through Sam's mind.

'No police, Will.'

'But, Eleanor-'

'I said no police!' she insisted, 'Do me a favor and go take care of the orders, will you? Mrs. Gilligan will make a scene again if her pancakes take any longer.'

'Uh...' he gawked at her, moving his head as if to say something, but ultimately threw up his hands and abandoned the short-lived argument, rushing through the restaurant's back door, for' service only'.

Nora helped her out of the car, soothing her with kind words and guiding her up a set of stairs placed right against the diner's back, unlocking the door at the end with one quick hand and inviting her into what she later learned was she and Willy's house.

Since she was still processing her actual situation, drinking in the shock, she drew a blank through most of that day. But she knows that Nora got her in the shower, cleaned and treated her wounds and lent her a clean set of clothes to wear, all the way trying with the biggest delicacy, as if Sam could break into pieces if she pushed too hard, to get an story out of her, before she at last crashed on Nora's sofa.

For what little she slept, she dreamt of busted eyes and endless roads.


	9. Tilia

Neither Willy nor Nora planned for her to stay, she was sure of that. Regardless of what Nora had seen in Sam's eyes, she had only thought of giving the girl some shelter before she actually felt ready to face the situation. It's what Nora had told her husband, unaware of Sam acting asleep while eavesdropping on their conversation. Willy felt apprehensive about the idea, naturally wary of the blood's origins. What if they were oblivious accomplices to an horrible crime? Then Nora had whispered something, from which Sam only picked up enough to know she was talking about her discarded clothes, and Willy fell silent.

When Sam finally 'woke up', Willy had prepared a big bowl of soup for her, a delicious plate she couldn't digest. Nora brought instead a warm cup of what she said was Linden Blossom Tea, indicating Sam to drink it in little sips. She had read about the herb, but never actually tried it. The beverage didn't taste good at all, but at least her stomach didn't reject it.

The old man excused himself, going back to attend their clients, and Nora sat down by her side on the sofa. Sam was expecting to be nudged to talk again, and her mind went on another race, thinking of all those cheap, bad horror movies Ly had made her swallow, of those girls with bloody t-shirts running onto the road to stop a car flailing their arms. She had already thought of five different scenarios to use as a cover, to be nothing but a helpless victim on the escape from a maniac who would surely come back for her if she ever contacted the police.

But then Nora made a single question.

'Who did this to you?'

And her plotting shattered into pieces, making way for that venom-bathed needle to emerge out from the nest and tear its burning way into her very core. Her face crumpled as if pulled by a string and the speech came pouring out her mouth between babbles and uncontainable sobs. The truth to which she had been trying to numb herself graved in three words. Enough for Nora to put the cup away and drown the girl in her comforting embrace, rocking back and forth and whispering a calming chant as she caressed her tangled mane.

Sam already knew what it was like to feel like an unstable compound, exploding under the smallest pressure. It's what had ruined her possibilities at a proper education, and what had scared away half of the people that accepted her as one of their own.

However, this was a different kind of reaction altogether. For as long as her memory could recall, crying never led anywhere. No one came to pick you up after a bad fall or to kiss your finger after a little accident with your father's tool. You had to suck it up and keep moving. Let it out in a playground fight or by smashing her garden's collection of trash with a metal pole. It had been beaten out of her system.

But guarded by Nora's strong arms, her moans muffled against her beating chest, she just felt like crying, and screaming, and holding onto her listener's extravagant shirt as all the knots from the last two days came undone with a painful tug, one by one.

So Nora and Willy never planned for her to stay, but that's exactly what happened in the end.

They were good people. Very good people. Having to leave that place as well was, from the beginning, a simple matter of time.


	10. Fix me up

The decision to let Sam stay wasn't made from one day to the other. Nora allowed her to sleep on their sofa until she felt ready to go, wordlessly telling her that, as far as she was concerned, there was nothing the police should know about.

Her first weeks in the diner were spent washing dishes and staying away from the public eye, partly for her own paranoia, partly because Nora didn't want any common client seeing her, so she wouldn't have to explain her sudden vanishing the day she finally took off. Her wounds, both physical and mental, took a while to heal, but as used as she was to the beatings and the berating, she somehow adapted them to be just another scar in the list. What her father had done was just as worse as kicking her in the stomach, locking her up in a filthy wardrobe for hours or practicing his aim throwing bottles of beer at her skinny frame. She repeated that to herself, until that bigger needle reduced its size and fit right with the rest in the nest, impossible to tell apart.

The long, sleepless nights were passed on the sofa, clutching Ly's shirt close to her chest, letting her scent bring her back to better times spent in her friend's room, wasting their time like normal kids should. Willy was kind enough to make a stop at San Fierro's library, bringing her entertainment after she shared with him and his wife her interest towards anything to do with chemistry or the living things. It helped to keep her inner demons at ease for a while, while she stayed in hiding. That was probably the longest she went through without raising her voice or a fist.

During that time, looking out the window from the second floor, Sam watched the clients come and go, noticing that the business was often frequented by the same gangs of bikers she would see driving on the roads next to her hometown. They parked their motorcycles in a line and spent half of the day hanging out in front of the diner, beers in hand. Nora talked about them, said they were just another bunch of idiots trying to form their own 'Angels of Death' gig, as if Sam should know what she was talking about.

After a second week of flipping through every channel, searching for her face on the news and getting nothing, the reality of her imminent parting fell upon her, and she realized how little she knew about the world out of movies and books and how she had zero places to go that weren't back home.

A lot of pondering later, she took a lucky shot, asking Willy for a box of tools, if he had any, and walking to the front of the building carrying it in one hand. She let it fall on the dirt, catching the bikers attention, and proudly announced that the diner would be lending mechanical services along with their drinks, from now on.

When she told Nora, asking her for a place where to live in exchange of whatever money she made upgrading and cleaning engines, it took the woman less than a second to agree to her conditions, adding a little requisite of her own, by which Sam would also work as a bartender the days there was nothing to fix. They shook hands on it, and that was how Sam bought her place among the curious couple. Nora made up a story, in case any of the more nosy customers asked, turning Sam into Sam Parker, a distant 18 years old nephew from Florida that wanted to pursue an acting career in Los Santos but didn't have the money to purchase it, and so would be working in the diner for a while, until she could handle her own bills.

Sam worked hard, inspirited by their support. She was a little rusty with the tools, but through a trial-and-error process learned enough so the gang, named 'Satan's Wheels' - yes, for real - trusted her with their babies, satisfied after every service. In-between practicing her mechanics and attending the bar, it was easy to keep her mind occupied, but it was also just as easy for her stress to grow and lose her temper with any particularly rude customer. There was once a greasy creep who tried sweet-talking her into getting in his car, and she snapped, grabbing the hot cup of coffee he had ordered and spilling it on his crotch. Needless to say the man wasn't pleased by the interaction, but Nora managed to handle the situation, and he left in a huff without further consequence. That day, after closing the diner, Nora sat her down and instructed her on the art of 'giving them what they want'.

She respected Sam and knew that guy had it coming, but she also knew how easily she had thrown back a snappy reply or placed a plate with excessive force the times a client had been far from pleasant. And unfortunately, one had to be able to absorb a lot of bullshit for a business to stay open. So she taught her about the forced smiles and the kind and dismissing two-worded replies. They used old Willy to practice, making him enact the role of different customers and putting Sam through the most irritating and awkward situations. It was hard, and poor Willy had to take a lot of yells from her part, but in the end she learned to take a deep inhale, shove aside the RAGE, and stretch her lips into a smile, muttering her replies through gritted teeth until she finally got it right.

It was during those lessons that Sam learned more about her adoptive aunt. One of the times she was sitting on her bed, listening to her speech, helping her fold the clean laundry, her hands stumbled upon the most amazing looking fabric Sam had ever encountered.

Leopard. Cheetah. Zebra. Their skin made leggings for the lucky individual that wore them. Sam dreamily asked Nora if she could use them, and she was met with a soft laugh. Too skinny for them, she said. Maybe when she was older. The strong woman would then recall with fondness her younger years, when she could wear them without ripping them open. It was in those little moments that Sam asked about her life, sadly putting away the beautiful clothes.

And Nora never went into detail, but, putting all her anecdotes in an orderly fashion, her life went more or less like this.

Nora's father was a strong-tempered man of big heart and little money, failed business after failed business, married to a woman that, through inherently good, had been raised in a hard environment. After many fights behind closed doors, her mother left, taking her daughter along, moving states and going to live with her uncle, without even asking for Nora's opinion on the matter. After struggling for many years, her mother lost the battle against herself, giving into alcohol and whatever drug she got from her numerous lovers. Nora avoided 'home' as often as she could, sick of her slobby uncle and set on making enough money to afford her marketing studies, accepting every job she got while attending her classes. The day her uncle attempted to take advantage of her, she put her belongings and what little coin she got in a bag and left, renting a small shitty apartment and following the same schedule. But her classes and her apartment kept getting more expensive by the day, and not even juggling with three different part-time jobs could she afford to reach the end of the month.

One of her friends - what few she had, given her busy agenda - was the one to tell her about her job at Casa Paraíso, a strip-club in her city, pretty famous at the time. She told her about how much she could make a week, if she worked for it, and she didn't need any more convincing. It was there that she learnt all about 'giving them what they want'.

This is where she made sure that Sam understood that was her choice, like many of the girls working there. People had this idea of strippers being ditzy bimbos too dumb to do anything else in life and full of daddy issues, dying to get drunk up their asses or high off their heels and fuck every client in the back of their car. For one case like that there were ten others proving all of those conceptions wrong. Nora was clean, top of her class even while dealing with life being a bitch and had as many daddy issues as any of the men or women who frequented the place, cause honestly, who didn't have them? She had NEVER thought about her uncle ever since she left that hellish house. And about the selling 'extras', well, it was when dealing with that kind of client that she met Willy. He was dragged to the place by a group of friends for his birthday - he had always been quite the reserved - and Nora happened to be one of the girls they hired for a private dance. She focused her attention on him, cause the guy was just so damn shy and adorable. Once the party was finished, one of the guys in his group followed her out of the building, being over-persistent about how she maybe could come with him to a nice hotel, have some fun and some wine. Willy intervened after her third negative, the guy got violent, and another friend of his joined the fight. Her dear Will threw a few mean punches before she had to take the two off him. Something people often overlooked is that one builds up quite the muscle after pole-dancing night after night. One of the guys left with his nose broken and the other limped away by the time she was done with them.

She met Willy again after that, a chance meeting when waiting in line in one of the local shops. They started talking, and well, there they were 30 years later. Casa Paraíso closed shortly after meeting Will, and because of a misfortunate series of circumstances, Nora had to drop college. Nevertheless, it was that same year that her father got in contact with her, and when she moved back with him, Willy followed. Her father was already old and crumpled, but the same hard-working, loving man he had always been. The diner was one of his latest failed projects, so with what money she had amounted and Willy's backing, she bought the place and used all her knowledge to put it back in motion. And just like her marriage, it was still up and running, long after her father passed away from old age.

Sam's respect towards the woman did nothing but increase in size after every little anecdote that formed her story, another reason why she could ever put aside her volatile nature and put her teachings to use, along with what she knew from her own experience with the troop. That way she soon became an adept at serving the coffee with a big smile and wish everybody a good day even if deep inside she hoped they'd be ran over by a truck. Working on the bikes was far more grateful, she didn't need to put on a smile when she was tightening the bolts or cleaning their chassis.

The bikers took a liking to her, and sometimes, after a job well done, they would take her for a fast ride, never getting too far from the restaurant. Once she had gotten used to the sensation, she would put her arms up in the air and let her body feel the speed and the air rushing around them, shouting for joy.

They would share beers with her and when they ever asked about Sam's life it was hilarious to make up a different tale everytime, molding that way many lives for herself, lives that never had a rundown house or a pervert for a father in them.

When she reunited the courage, on the less busy days, she would start driving the monsters herself, with the owner's permission, of course, promising that any incident would be on the house.

It was one of the guys in that gang who covertly offered her a little white pill, saying that she'd learn a lot faster to drive them if she wasn't scared of falling.


	11. Lessons

Most of her first year in the diner went by without major incidents. There was just that one time when a client had been certainly rude towards Willy, going as far as raising his fist, and Sam had chased him out of the diner before the old man could respond to the attack, wielding a frying pan and swinging it hard enough to break the asshole's teeth. Despite laughing at the scene, Nora forbid her from working again until she had cooled down. She had lost it, that much she could admit, so she retired to the sofa for the day, taking a deep breath and watching TV to pass the time. The news full of gang fights and stars scandals.

Apart from those isolated happenings, things were good. She had even dared to make little trips to San Fierro, to help Willy with the shopping and any other errand. By the third time she had stopped looking over her shoulder, studying people's faces or panicking if anybody stared at her for too long.

She also got along with the gang of bikers, enough time spent with them to know they were nothing like their name suggested. Only some of them ever acted a bit crazy, a bit too enthusiastic, but she soon learned that was just the speed talking, that same little pill that she had been offered. Nora struggled somewhat with the fact she had become such good friends with the bunch, and often advised her against it, or to at least be careful with what she said or what she did around them. To remember she was still 15 years old, not 19, like people believed. But Sam never gave her reasons to truly intervene.

That's of course cause she didn't know about her little escapades. There was nothing she could say to excuse herself. To keep it short and simple, leather jackets and a roaring engine were enough to make her rebellious hormones boil, and she acted upon it. No matter how much she learned to reprise her instincts when serving orders, for Nora's sake, that energy that characterized her had to come out one way or another. Better make out with a young biker on the seat of a motorcycle than punch the lights out a moaning client who didn't like their coffee neither too hot or too cold. Cause god, did she feel like punching something many times in the same day.

To hell with her mother's fears and to hell with her own apprehensions. For the first time in her life, there was no hell to go back to, everyday; for the first time in her life, she was experiencing true freedom.

It was in the zenith of her newly-found confidence that she stumbled upon yet another critical turn-around in her life.

It was a boring day in the diner, no bikers around and hardly two or three clients to attend. She had already smoked three cigars in a row outside, desperate with boredom. Resorting to cleaning the tables and picking up the scarce tips, she approached two guys sitting at the farthest corner, some of the few faces that usually crowded the place as of lately, taking out her little bloc to write down the order. Nora often preferred to serve the tables herself, leaving Sam the bar and the cleaning part, but given that she had nothing better to do, and that the woman was busy trying to fix a broken sink, the girl didn't mind taking care of it. Sam noticed one of them, the overweight man with long hair, writing down on his own notebook, discussing with his companion about something in what she had already distinguished as Spanish a while ago. She sneaked a look, taking slow steps, and confirmed it was indeed a list. At first she would have taken it for a shopping one - batteries, salt, road flares, dishes - but then she noticed the side notes, materials of long names, some of which she recognized, others that she didn't, followed by fractions and percentages.

_Chemistry_, her mind screamed.

The guy abruptly closed his notebook, snapping her out of her trance.

'What are you looking at?' he spit at her with a strong accent. His friend was also staring at her, not even with half the alarm the other man was giving out, but still somewhat suspicious. He looked younger, his dark hair brushed back and his beard lined and sharp. She rushed to put on a Nora-branded smile before speaking.

'Oh, nothing, I was just- well, I'm sorry, I couldn't help but take a look at what you were writing, and-'

'What about it?' he interrupted, sitting back and lifting his chin in what she guessed was supposed to be a defying posture.

'Jose, easy.' muttered the other, calmly patting the air.

'Uhm, nothing...?' she shrugged, 'I was just wondering- you guys are studying chemistry? Like, in college?'

Both of them furrowed their brows at the question, sharing a side-long glance before bursting out laughing. Sam stood there, the smile frozen on her lips, unaware of what was so funny.

'Hahaha! Joder, estudiantes dice...' sighed the guy called Jose. She didn't know what that meant, but she caught enough from his tone to realize she had said something apparently stupid.

'Sorry, I just- I saw some of the things you had in the list, the red phosphorus and the sulfuric acid, and...' she held up her hands, pursing her lips and forcing the smile to stay in place, 'Well! You know, not your usual shopping list.'

Their laughing gradually died down, while wiping their faces and shaking their heads. 'Aaah, yeah, well, you know, maybe you should just, mind your own business.' he replied, mockingly mimicking her intonation, 'Stop talking about shit you don't know about. And bring us our coffee, _camarera_.' he prolonged those last syllables, with a scornful sneer, and turned back to laugh in compliance with his companion.

Sam's jaw was already in motion, his teeth sinking into her inner cheek while she made a giant effort to maintain a friendly expression. Something in her head clicked, and her mind started racing once again. She lifted up the bloc, the pen menacing to break in half under her grip.

'Hmm-mm. Milk, sugar?'

'Black.' he dismissed her with a waving hand.

Sam nodded, writing it down and walking away, stepping behind the bar.

Ten minutes later, she came back with their coffees, gently placing them down on the table and going back to her other chores. Nora finally came back from the kitchen, grumping about her soaked clothes and how she wished Sam could also work as a plumber cause the motherfuckers charged _good_ for any service. Sam threw a glance at the men every now and then, as she discussed the matter with Nora, mentally counting every sip she saw Jose take.

Once she was sure he was at least half-way done, she excused herself and approached them, missing Nora's calls behind her.

'Enjoying your coffee?' she asked, hands on her hips and employing her most professional tone to date. Both men interrupted their conversation to turn to her, making an effort to remember who she was before the biggest one curtly replied. 'Yeah?'

'Everything is to your taste? Nothing out of place?' she continued, pointedly talking to Jose now. He frowned, obviously bothered by her presence.

'Yes, yes, it's all good!' he insisted, 'Now, do you mind?'

'Am I glad to hear so, sir. That means you have...' she leaned forward, looking into his cup, 'Ah, yes! All of it gone, isn't that excellent!' she squealed, 'It shouldn't take too long from now, in that case!'

Both men looked at her now as if she was a nutjob. 'The fuck are you talking about?' he asked, shrugging his shoulders as he looked at the other man, grinning widely in disbelief.

Sam joined him, giving a little chuckle. 'Well, you see, I've always wanted to try a little theory of mine, nothing special! You mind if I share it with you? I know you're busy with your busy business, but...'

'Wh-'

'Okay, great! So listen up. You know how they say apple seeds are toxic? I found out, that's because they contain amygdalin- which is normally extracted from almonds, but it is indeed present in many other seeds and nuts. If decomposed, they turn into benzaldehyde AND prussic acid. And both form the compound known as...?'

She pointed at both men with a big, open-mouth smile, widening her eyes, as they listened to her ramble with their mouths slightly open and their eyes squinted. Jose gawked, probably trying to find the right words to tell her to please, just leave them the fuck alone, but she kept on talking.

'Hydrogen cyanide! Yes! Now, small quantities are alright, our body is totally ready to take it, but guess what happens when it comes in laaarger amounts?' she grimaced, wrinkling her nose, 'Uuuugly stuff, that's what happens. So I've been saving every eaten apple people have left in their plate, cause, I mean, how interesting is that? Of course I could do nothing with just the seeds, they have this little, outter shell that protects them, so I had to put aaaaall these apple seeds, in a blender...!' she laughed, they didn't, 'Ah, geez- and then, I thought, shit, this will be a big waste of time if the cyanide just, evaporates! Right? So I used NaOH, you know, caustic soda? So it could be absorbed and then sealed tight. You following me?'

They kept staring at her like deers in front of a car light.

'Good! So I dissolve the soda in water, fifty-fifty, and then pour all of it in the blender, and ta-da! Five minutes later, I had this little bag filled with a fatal dose of poison, that I made from apples! Apples! Can you believe it?'

The men lasted dumbfounded for a few seconds, before Jose finally seemed to process what exactly she was saying, looking down at his cup of coffee as his mouth hung open. Sam leaned forward again, resting both her hands on the table and speaking in a lower tone.

'Considering I'm just a dumb bartender, this is just a presumption, but- if I did it right, and my calculations are correct, you have around...' she tilted her head, exaggerating a thoughtful frown, '... I'd say, thirty seconds left.'

Jose locked eyes with her, his forehead already glistening with the first drops of sweat. 'What... for what?'

She smiled, raising her eyebrows in a fake, sympathetic gesture. The other man jerked finally awake, holding onto the table. '¿Qué cojones...?'

Jose started to gasp for air, his eyes shifting from Sam to his friend. 'You crazy b-bitch... Hugo, ¡haz algo...!' he cried, pulling at his shirt's neck, his skin turning redder by the second. Hugo pulled himself up, screaming at Sam. 'Whatever you have done to him, you better fucking stop it!'

'Too late.' she drew up her shoulders, nonchalantly. 'Your friend's a goner.'

He continued yelling at her, as Jose braced himself to stand up, breathing in suffocated wheezes. She heard Nora talking behind them, surely rushing to get to the scene. All at once the diner froze when a loud, air-ripping fart muted all other noises in a crescendo wave of stinking glory.

The big guy immediately held his stomach, with an arduous groan, pushing Sam out of the way and running as fast as he could with his legs crossed to the diner's bathroom, slamming the door close behind him.

Hugo gawped at the door, slowly turning to meet Sam's grin, who was evidently holding back a laugh.

'What...?' he stuttered.

She cracked up, holding up the empty cup and waving it in the air. 'Laxative...!' she choked out, putting the cup back down. 'Tons of it. Oooooh, man, are you guys naive...!'

Hugo looked fixedly to the cup, his mouth's corners lifting bit by bit until he was laughing himself. 'Holy shit...!'

'Yeah...!'

'Holy shit! You got me! You totally got me!' he repeated, 'All of that shit you just said, all of that was made-up?'

She cackled, sitting on the table and swinging her feet. 'Na-aah, that was true. I have never actually tried, of course, but yeah. As far as I can tell, it can be done.' she nodded, smiling satisfyingly. 'I used to make rat poison at home, with flour, sugar and baking soda. I bet making poison out of apples can't be much harder.'

Hugo sat back down, studying her with amusement. 'Huh. Well, aren't you the surprise.' he commented with a lopsided smile, 'What was your name again...?'

She gave him a playful smirk. 'I didn't tell you.'

'Sam!'

Both their heads snapped in the bar's direction, where Nora stood, a grave scowl tightening her features. 'Come here, now.' she demanded, entering the kitchen.

Sam jumped off the table with a puzzled look on her face. Nora normally had fun with these kind of stunts, no matter how she scolded Sam afterwards for it. That face just now, though, that wasn't something Sam had ever seen on her adoptive aunt. She waved goodbye at Hugo, who didn't seem worried in the least, and made her way into the kitchen, where Nora waited for her, arms crossed.

'Did you see that?' Sam cheerfully asked, pointing a thumb at the door. 'The guy _literally_ shat his pants...!'

But Nora's expression didn't change, she kept staring down at her, pursing her lips in a contained manner.

'Uh... what's up?'

'I don't want you speaking to those men, ever again.'

'Huh?'

'I told you, I took care of the tables, you stayed behind the bar. Didn't I tell you that?'

Sam shielded herself raising her hands, confused. 'Wow, calm down. It was just a little joke- I mean, the guy was being an asshole, even his friend laughed!'

'I don't care, Sam, I said I don't want you speaking to them, or taking their orders, or approaching them in any way. Did I make myself clear?'

Sam let her hands fall, struggling to understand her friend's posture. 'Why?'

'They are dangerous, Sam. That's all you need to know.' she stated, stepping aside to exit the kitchen.

'Wait, wait, wait, dangerous? What do you mean, dangerous?'

Nora wheeled around, leaning closer. 'No, talking, to them. Understood?'

'... okay.'

And she left, leaving Sam alone and at a complete loss as to what had just happened.

But the only advice she had ever taken seriously was her brother Louis', when he told her to run.

Next time she accompanied Willy in his errands, she made a little stop at the internet café, pretty close to the place Willy was picking up the supplies from. Searching all the ingredients she could remember from the list was all she needed to get her answers.

Methamphetamine.

Speed.

The little white pills.

She watched video after video of drug raids, the amount of money police seized, the huge operations they discovered every time. Sometimes in houses, right under the nose of a whole neighborhood.

Giant, breath-taking labs settled in their basements.


	12. Coffee Black

Confronting Nora about it was a must, of course. She waited until after diner and followed the woman inside her bedroom, getting straight to the point. There was no place for playing fool between them, and if Sam had one thing about her, that was her bluntness, for better or for worse. Nora beat around the bush at first, playing dumb to Sam's implications, maintaining that they were simply bad company, not at all related to drugs or any of what Sam was implying. A futile fight, as she ultimately broke down and admitted to knowing exactly what they were since the moment they had first entered her establishment, leaving a brown bag forgotten on the table that another man picked up immediately after.

Sam couldn't comprehend how she could have let that happen for so long, in the place she claimed to be queen and deserving of respect. And the strong woman lifted her gaze, a broken window of her normally refulgent black pearls, and after what felt like forever, whispered in a faint murmur that she had already lost a daughter for a fight that, from the beginning, she was sentenced to lose.

'You had a daughter?' was her first reaction, simply stupefied by the confession.

Nora opened her nightstand's drawer, taking out an old, wooden frame containing the picture of a young, smiling girl, seemingly of Sam's actual age, her eyes and mouth the very reflection of her mother's. Time had stolen the paper's color, enhancing its haunting nostalgia.

Nora told her about how her daughter, Christine, worked as a bartender in her diner, as well. About her innocence and her terrible naivety. She met the very same man Sam had tricked the other day, when he was younger and, for most eyes, handsome looking. She fell for the charm of the unknown and the dangerous, despite her parents' advices. Nora was softer, at the time. She hated her daughter's new sweetheart, but hated even more the idea of Christine despising her. She knew what it was like, to feel unsupported by your own mother. Feared that the outcome of forbidding a rebellious teenager of doing what she wanted would be far worse than the current problem.

However, the day she found out what the men used her diner for, how they had turned it into a meeting point for the addicted and the unpredictable, she had stood her ground. Told them to leave, and never come back. How their organization wasn't welcome there. Her dear Will pulled out his shotgun, to emphasize her remark, and the men left, warning her about what happened to those who crossed the cartel. Her daughter fell apart, of course, and just like Nora had foreseen, she rioted against their prohibitions, sneaking out of their sight and running to meet with them, spending as long as days unreachable for their caring embrace.

Those monsters turned her into a shell of her former self. Every time she came back home, she looked paler, skinnier, her skin wounded and her eyes bloodshot and staring nowhere. There were many discussions, yells thrown at one another, as she and Willy tried to make Christine understand she was destroying herself like that. But no matter what they did to help her, whenever they thought she had taken a step forward, something pushed her down below, back to the starting point. Then one day Nora opened the door to her bedroom and she was laying back on her own vomit. Still. Lifeless. Gone.

The day those men came back, all strength had been drained from her. Drug-related violence and murders were first place in every news channel, in every newspaper. She was scared, that they would try and take away what little she got left. Begged Willy to please, let it be. To play blind and deaf, and let them do their deals. They got nothing to use against them. They got nothing to erase them from their lives.

She exhaled a mirthless laugh, telling Sam that was the very same reason Willy hadn't doubted for a second when picking her up with his car. It was easy, around these parts, to ignore every kind of atrocity. It was horrible, how common they had become to their daily life. But seeing a girl, same age as their dear Christine, covered in blood, lost in the middle of the road? He couldn't let that pass by.

Sam put her arms around her adoptive aunt, consoling her as best as she knew as Nora cried on her shoulder, imploring her to please, not mention it to Will, cause he had suffered enough already. To please, not become involved with them. And Sam caressed her back, promising that things would be alright.

* * *

><p>Months passed and she never exchanged one more word with them. She focused on the motorcycles, attending the bar and cleaning the tables. Hugo tried chatting with her again, when she was outside, laying on the dirt as she checked any of the faulty choppers, and all he ever got in return was the two-worded dismissing replies she had learned by memory, maybe a smile, and never more.<p>

Distressed by the recurring awkward conversations and after explaining her need to move and release energy, Nora gave her some free hours a day so she could go take a walk around the encircling territory. Mount Chiliad wasn't that far on feet, and Willy was happy to hear Sam had developed a liking for hiking, putting on fresh, comfortable clothes and using the less busy days of the week to spend a few hours exploring the mountain. She confessed to Nora that it was also a way to distance herself from undesired companies, clearing her mind with some jogging, like she used to do as a kid, when she ran in circles around her house. How that way she would do less stupidities, without entering in detail. And it indeed helped, because whenever she came back from the exercise Sam was often in a far better mood, her patience outstretched to unheard of capacities, no longer needing to spend as much time with the bikers, even if she still hung out with them every so often.

One of those times she went to the city with Willy, to the same street they always did their shopping at, she came back with a bag full of seeds to plant, flowers of beautiful colors and exotic appearances. Sam proposed giving a little life to the diner by spreading them around the otherwise dead area around it, and both owners seconded the motion, watching with delight from inside the restaurant how Sam carefully planted them in a row, using gloves and a hat to protect herself from both the fertilizer and the sun as she consulted her books, spread open on the ground next to her knees.

Watching Sam reinvent herself like that, step by step and with such precious determination gave both Nora and Willy a sense of satisfaction that they thought they'd never experience again after their daughter's death.

'I believe God is giving us a second chance, Eleanor.' Willy would comment to his wife, a warm smile brightening his tired face.

And Nora believed his words, despite not being a religious woman. Nora believed that if a girl that had been broken so many times could lift her chin and look forward, then so could they.

That's why she never saw it coming.

It all happened too fast. One moment she was serving the tables, with Sam behind the bar, the everyday murmur of clients chattering and the coffee machine running involving her as she worked on autopilot. There was a gasp, a muffled scream and the sound of something heavy falling to the ground. And all of sudden she was watching a man convulsing to death on the square tiles of her establishment, eyes white and leaking through every orifice of his body. Her daughter's ex-sweetheart died in terrible pain, in front of their helpless stares. Someone screamed to call an ambulance, the other man, his usual companion, screamed back at them to call nobody, unless they wanted their throats slit. He carried his friend outside, not without effort, pushing his body on the backseat of their car and driving away, leaving everyone to deal with the commotion.

So busy they were, gossiping about the cartel, about gangs plotting against one another, that no one noticed the quiet girl behind the bar, calmly observing the scene as someone would a tennis match. Gone back to mopping as soon as Hugo left the scene with the corpse, a faint smile of satisfaction curling her lips.

No one did, except for Nora.

* * *

><p>She waited until that night, when Sam went upstairs for a break, the diner empty after the unfortunate occurrence. Willy was out for the day, thank god, on a little trip to his home state, to deal with family matters. She didn't even want to imagine what would have happened if he had been present. What would he have done the moment Hugo threatened them.<p>

Nora stood in front of the TV Sam was watching, as if nothing had happened at all. The girl asked her what was wrong, a terrifyingly convincing innocence plaguing her voice.

'What have you done, Sam?'

The girl blinked back at her, acting disorientated. 'What have I done?'

'That man. His coffee. I served it, but you made it.' Nora stated, monotonously.

'His coffee?'

'You poisoned him.'

Sam held her stare, and Nora felt her eyes piercing her skin. Silent, but uncovered.

'Oh god.' she whispered. 'It's true... it was you.' Nora shook her head at the unconceivable truth. 'Oh god, Sam, what have you done?'

'Yes, what have I done?' she repeated after a long pause, shrugging her shoulders. 'What's wrong with it, exactly?'

Nora gawped at her, her chin trembling, and spoke louder and with eyes wide open. 'You, just killed, a man. You just killed somebody!'

Sam stood up, keeping an indifferent posture. 'I killed the man, that not only was oppressing you, as if he was the boss of the place, but that also killed your daughter, Nora. They won't be able to trace anything, I made sure of that. He's GONE.' she opened her arms at the woman, her mouth twisting up in an ironic laugh, 'He, killed, your daughter! That son of a bitch had it coming!'

'NO. This is not okay, Sam!' Nora roared, her voice hoarse.

'How can it not be?' Sam choked out, astounded, 'What is your problem? It's his fault your daughter died, in any case you should be wishing he had suffered LONGER-'

'STOP!' she sobbed out, drops of spit flying out of her mouth, 'Don't you dare use my daughter's death to justify what you've done!'

'But-'

'No one murdered Christine! My daughter killed herself!' she cried out, her face distorted with excruciating agony, 'God knows I love her, and I will always mourn her loss, but that MAN did NOT kill her! He just gave her the gun! SHE was the one to pull the trigger, Sam!'

An unrelenting pain grabbed her by the throat, strangling her sobs, with Sam's eyes fixated on her, expressionless. No answers to give her.

Nora took a deep, shuddering inhale, clenching her fists and finally lifting her gaze to meet Sam's. She just looked back at her. Impassive. And like the day they met, one look was all she needed.

'I won't report you the police.' Nora muttered. 'I won't do it, I'll give you that one chance. But...' she moved her head from one side to the other, slowly, tightening her jaw, '... I will not, tolerate, death to be taken lightly. Not here, not in MY home. You can't stay here anymore.'

Sam's eyes dropped with those last words, her face however still hollow of emotion.

'... pack your stuff and go. I'll leave you a three months worth of pay on the counter. Consider it my last favor.'

She slammed the door behind her, leaving Sam with the buzzing TV.

* * *

><p>She was sixteen, the night she packed what little stuff she got. She made a little stop in Nora's wardrobe, to pick up those leggings that had enchanted her a while ago. There was no way she would be taking her money, so she guessed that borrowing those old things that she never used couldn't be that big of a crime. She walked past the diner's entrance, avoiding to look inside through the giant windows.<p>

Nothingness, once again, her old friend. Protecting her from the rage and the upset and all things hazard.

She was ready to take on the road, this time knowing at least what direction to go. But a car's honk stopped that train of thought. The dark vehicle scraped its wheels on the dirt, stopping next to her. The window went down and Hugo looked up at her, smiling.

'Need a ride?'

He didn't speak much, on their way to San Fierro. Probably noticed Sam's vacant stare, her gaze lost on the road ahead. Holding the wheel with one hand, he rummaged through his pants pockets with the other, taking out a little sealed bag full of white pills.

'Here, take one.' he suggested, handling her the plastic. 'It'll make you feel better.'

And, unlike all the preceding times, when the bikers had offered her the same antidote, she took it.


End file.
